E. Norman Torry

“A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa.”

“After all, when you come across the word prothalamium and find it means a preliminary nuptial song and a yaffle is a green woodpecker-well, I ask you! You cannot let matters rest there-or can you? Peradventure you will develop into lexicomaniacs.”

“A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.”